Key takeaways
- Christophe founded Terres de Café in Paris in 2009, at a time when specialty coffee had virtually no market presence in France, with around 95% of consumers buying their coffee from supermarkets.
- The brand’s name, packaging design, and sourcing philosophy all trace back to the French concept of terroir – a framework borrowed from winemaking to communicate origin, soil, and human craft.
- Terres de Café now operates 20 shops across France, Belgium, and South Korea, with a growing B2B arm supplying coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, and offices.
- Through its annual think tank Beantrophy, the brand advocates for the long-term future of specialty coffee in the face of climate change and market dilution.
Roaster of the Week is a series that focuses on specialty coffee roasters and their unique stories. This week, we spoke to Terres de Café, a Parisian roastery whose identity is built entirely around the concept of terroir – from the name on the bag to the coffee inside it. The roastery also took two golds and a silver at the Global Coffee Awards 2025, winning Filter Experimental and Flat White Dairy Experimental with its Java Las Flores from Colombia.
When Christophe Servell launched Terres de Café in Paris in 2009, there was no specialty coffee market to speak of. Around 95% of French consumers were buying their coffee in supermarkets, and the roasters considered high quality by the standards of the day were roasting too dark and buying conventionally. The nuance of where coffee came from and how it was grown was invisible. Read on for his insights.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter
Sign up
Wine, a grandfather, and a forest coffee in Ethiopia
Christophe came to coffee through wine, not the other way round. That background handed him a framework French coffee did not yet have, and it still shapes every decision the company makes.
His grandfather had been a roaster. His deep familiarity with the French wine industry then gave him a way of thinking that barely existed in coffee at the time: terroir. “I knew wine very well. I knew what terroir meant through wine in France,” he explains.
The turning point came when he encountered an Ethiopian forest coffee that made the gap between what coffee was and what it could be impossible to ignore. He founded Terres de Café that same year, with a business plan for ten shops in five years.
The reality turned out harder and slower, but ultimately more expansive. Terres de Café now runs 20 locations across three countries, plus a B2B arm that accounts for half the company’s revenue. Origin stories like this one do real commercial work in specialty coffee, because they give a brand something competitors cannot copy.
As the European specialty coffee market has grown more competitive, sustainability-focused independents have found themselves up against multinational brands with established distribution networks. That makes a strong founding philosophy more than a differentiator. It becomes a survival strategy for brands that want to endure.
Terroir, traceability, and what goes on the bag
The name Terres de Café translates as “lands of coffee.” In French, terre means both land and soil – the two elements at the heart of the terroir concept. For Christophe, this was not branding as decoration. It was a statement of intent about how the company would approach sourcing, roasting, and what it printed on its bags.
“The concept of French terroir includes one soil, one climate, one place – but also men and techniques,” he explains. “That’s how in Burgundy you have a producer and two metres above, another producer. The same grape, nearly the same soil, but a totally different wine.” Every Terres de Café bag carries full traceability – varieties, processing method, drying technique, parcel origin. As Christophe puts it, “the further we can go with traceability, the more we go.” Roasters who display origin and farmer name signal transparency and quality to increasingly discerning consumers, and custom printed packaging allows that information to be integrated directly into the design layer of the bag rather than through applied labels, reducing material use in the process.
The three monkeys on the back of every bag are, like everything else about the brand, traceable back to a specific origin. “The idea of the monkeys comes from the little monkeys that love coffee cherries in Ethiopia,” Christophe explains.
“The first trip I made was to Ethiopia, and seeing the monkeys making the people insane because they eat the cherries – here are the monkeys.” The image is not a design studio invention. It is a record of a real encounter at the very beginning of the brand’s story.
Packaging imagery shapes consumer perception before the coffee is ever tasted, and imagery rooted in authentic storytelling gives the brand something defensible and distinct. The Spojka Roastery, winner of the Global Coffee Awards Packaging prize for Europe, offers a parallel: their hand-spray-painted bags emerged from a belief in coffee as artistic expression, producing packaging that no algorithm could replicate.
The Paris coffee boom
Paris now sees around ten new coffee shops opening every month. Across France the number may be closer to 50 or 60. But Christophe is clear that volume does not equate to genuine specialty.
“More than half of this offer – these coffee shops – this is not specialty coffee. This is conventional coffee.” The booming café scene has, in his view, created a real risk that the word “specialty” becomes so diluted as to lose its meaning, undermining the work done by the pioneering generation to associate it with traceability, sustainability, and respect for producers.
Across Europe, specialty roasters are facing increasing competition from businesses that prioritise traceability and ethical sourcing, even as they contend with the market power of multinational chains.
Terres de Café’s response has been to double down. “Our strategy is to not change anything – even going higher on quality, sustainability, traceability.” On the B2B side, the team actively works to educate its wholesale customers: if they want to stand out from the mass of new openings, they need to say something meaningful about the coffee they serve.
Beantrophy, expansion, and what comes next
Beantrophy is Christophe’s attempt to take that message beyond Terres de Café’s own customer base. He describes it as “positive lobbying” – a think tank gathering of around 200 carefully selected professionals held annually in Paris around World of Coffee, bringing together producers, roasters, journalists, and equipment manufacturers to discuss the future of the industry.
The central argument is urgent: if the specialty sector continues without taking seriously the climate pressures bearing down on coffee-producing regions, high-quality coffee will become a luxury only the very wealthy can afford.
France’s organic coffee sales have grown by 10% annually since 2020, suggesting consumer awareness is rising – but Christophe believes the industry needs to lead. This year, Beantrophy will, for the first time, invite coffee shops beyond Terres de Café’s own B2B customers, with the message that engaging seriously with the coffee they sell is a commercial survival strategy, not just an ethical one.
On the expansion front, the team plans to open new locations in Rennes and Aix-en-Provence before the end of the year. November brings the biggest step of all. The first Terres de Café Légendes shop opens in Paris, carrying only coffees scoring 90 points and above, and the concept borrows directly from three-star restaurant hospitality. It is the clearest statement yet of the strategy Christophe described earlier: go higher on experience and quality rather than broader on volume.
Longer-term, Christophe has aspirations for Barcelona, Berlin, and a project in Central America he is not yet ready to discuss. Each international location has come through local partners rather than direct expansion – a conscious choice for an independent company without external equity, and one already proven in South Korea, where Terres de Café operates in a market of an estimated 100,000 coffee shops.
If you’re looking to elevate your coffee packaging with high-quality, customisable, and sustainable solutions, MTPak Coffee can help. From recyclable mono-material bags to custom-printed designs that carry your traceability information and brand story, we work with you to create packaging that reflects your values at first glance.
Contact the MTPak Coffee team to explore our fully customisable specialty coffee packaging.
FAQ
Where is Terres de Café based?
Terres de Café is headquartered in Paris, France, where it operates multiple retail locations. It also has shops in Brussels, Belgium and in South Korea, and is expanding to Rennes and Aix-en-Provence in France.
What does “Terres de Café” mean?
The name translates as “lands of coffee” in French. Terre means both land and soil, grounding the brand in the terroir concept – the idea that flavour is shaped by origin, soil, climate, and the people who cultivate the crop.
What is Beantrophy?
Beantrophy is an annual specialty coffee think tank and advocacy event organised by Terres de Café in Paris, bringing together producers, roasters, journalists, and industry figures to discuss the future of specialty coffee, climate change, and sustainability.
